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(BOX ART PIC)BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B002I41KN2/ref=dp_image_z_0?ie=UTF8&n=130&s=dvd
STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Behind the Scenes Documentary
• Ghost House Micro Video featuring Winds of Plague
• Trailer Gallery

The Pitch

John Carpenter’s The Thing, but with a cast of twenty-somethings and an abominable bleach blonde Val Kilmer.

The Humans

Martha MacIsaac. Aaron Ashmore. Kyle Schmid. Steph Song. Val “Huckleberry” Kilmer.

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The Nutshell

Kind folks Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, formerly wunderkind director-producer team responsible for the Evil Dead films turned producers of teen-slanted horror flicks, deliver a semi-remake of The Thing with a new emphasis on a heavy-handed environmental message.

But with the pull of Val “I survived the bank robbery in Heat” Kilmer, the package sure looks tempting for straight-to-shelf fare.

The Lowdown

If you’ve made it this far into my review, you’ll be quite familiar with the fact that Mark A. Lewis’ The Thaw is heavily indebted to John Carpenter’s seminal piece of science fiction horror, right down to its isolated northern setting, abundance of helicopter shots, a distress call from a research team and a health dose of body horror. While not a beat for beat rip-off (the “antagonists” of the film are quite different than that of The Thing), there are enough of the same elements in place that it’s hard to deny there’s at least homage being paid.

The Thaw strives in these similarities and crumbles in most of its differences. Whereas The Thing, although shot on soundstages, feels entirely like the work of a crew that was out in the frigid shit and in a real research facility, Lewis’ film suffers from low-budget blandness in environments and characters. Isolation, rather than feeling oppressive and haunting, feels rather boring here.

Lewis’ script (co-written with maybe-brother Michael W. Lewis) also suffers from the mistake of frontloading every character with ambiguous, heavy dialogue that assures the audience that they have deep issues with each other, but we’re not sure exactly what. Kilmer’s character Dr. David Kruipen is having some sort of issues with his daughter Evelyn (Martha MacIsaac, most recognizable from Superbad) over either Evelyn’s mother or his environmentalist agenda. Aaron Ashmore’s budding researcher clashes with Evelyn because he admires her father’s past of eco-terrorism. And then they fall in love, I guess.

The Thing had characters that unfolded naturally in their environment, without the burden of baggage; we meet the characters and learn about them through their actions and arguments. Every character here comes with sexual history or an unnecessarily dark past, to make everything seem twice as grave as it needs to be.

And then there’s the horror aspect of the story, which is embedded in a very unsubtle message about the dangers of global warming. You see, global warming has unfrozen an ancient mammoth (still complete with fur!) that is host to a breed of insects that lay their eggs in warm flesh and destroy your immune system. It’d be one thing if we had a true-blue horror film that hinges upon global warming, but when all of your ecological conflict and dialogue essentially functions as a defrosting mechanism, you’ve thoroughly wasted our time.

And I know I sound like a broken record, here, but The Thing wove a message about the AIDS epidemic into its fabric without ever mentioning such a thing in its dialogue. It can be done.

There’s certainly some positive aspects of the film though — Kilmer’s opening monologue, while as vague as the rest of the dialogue in the film, is particularly haunting, and the performances throughout the film are actually uniformly good. The Thaw does the same thing Starship Troopers 3 does though, by confining its only star with any sort of audience draw to his own scenes, probably due to the fact that Kilmer was only on set for a few days. As a result, he and his daughter only interact on the screen once in 94 minutes.

I also dig the hell out of the Youtube-themed opening credit sequence, and despite the fact that it’s poorly implemented, the ecological framework of the movie at the very least peaked my interests throughout. Not a total waste of time, but not a brilliant use of it, either.

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The Package

The Thaw is part of Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s Ghost House Underground label, which is essentially churning out a series of low-budget horror films by new filmmakers. This means the primary special feature on the disc is an onslaught of trailers for the other flicks in this series.

Also on the disc is a perfunctory behind the scenes documentary that doesn’t have too much going for it. Like the feature itself, The Thaw’s package is underwhelming at best.

(TITLE PIC)
(BOX ART PIC)BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B002I41KN2/ref=dp_image_z_0?ie=UTF8&n=130&s=dvd
STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Behind the Scenes Documentary
• Ghost House Micro Video featuring Winds of Plague
• Trailer Gallery

The Pitch

John Carpenter’s The Thing, but with a cast of twenty-somethings and an abominable bleach blonde Val Kilmer.

The Humans

Martha MacIsaac. Aaron Ashmore. Kyle Schmid. Steph Song. Val “Huckleberry” Kilmer.

(PIC)

The Nutshell

Kind folks Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, formerly wunderkind director-producer team responsible for the Evil Dead films turned producers of teen-slanted horror flicks, deliver a semi-remake of The Thing with a new emphasis on a heavy-handed environmental message.

But with the pull of Val “I survived the bank robbery in Heat” Kilmer, the package sure looks tempting for straight-to-shelf fare.

The Lowdown

If you’ve made it this far into my review, you’ll be quite familiar with the fact that Mark A. Lewis’ The Thaw is heavily indebted to John Carpenter’s seminal piece of science fiction horror, right down to its isolated northern setting, abundance of helicopter shots, a distress call from a research team and a health dose of body horror. While not a beat for beat rip-off (the “antagonists” of the film are quite different than that of The Thing), there are enough of the same elements in place that it’s hard to deny there’s at least homage being paid.

The Thaw strives in these similarities and crumbles in most of its differences. Whereas The Thing, although shot on soundstages, feels entirely like the work of a crew that was out in the frigid shit and in a real research facility, Lewis’ film suffers from low-budget blandness in environments and characters. Isolation, rather than feeling oppressive and haunting, feels rather boring here.

Lewis’ script (co-written with maybe-brother Michael W. Lewis) also suffers from the mistake of frontloading every character with ambiguous, heavy dialogue that assures the audience that they have deep issues with each other, but we’re not sure exactly what. Kilmer’s character Dr. David Kruipen is having some sort of issues with his daughter Evelyn (Martha MacIsaac, most recognizable from Superbad) over either Evelyn’s mother or his environmentalist agenda. Aaron Ashmore’s budding researcher clashes with Evelyn because he admires her father’s past of eco-terrorism. And then they fall in love, I guess.

The Thing had characters that unfolded naturally in their environment, without the burden of baggage; we meet the characters and learn about them through their actions and arguments. Every character here comes with sexual history or an unnecessarily dark past, to make everything seem twice as grave as it needs to be.

And then there’s the horror aspect of the story, which is embedded in a very unsubtle message about the dangers of global warming. You see, global warming has unfrozen an ancient mammoth (still complete with fur!) that is host to a breed of insects that lay their eggs in warm flesh and destroy your immune system. It’d be one thing if we had a true-blue horror film that hinges upon global warming, but when all of your ecological conflict and dialogue essentially functions as a defrosting mechanism, you’ve thoroughly wasted our time.

And I know I sound like a broken record, here, but The Thing wove a message about the AIDS epidemic into its fabric without ever mentioning such a thing in its dialogue. It can be done.

There’s certainly some positive aspects of the film though — Kilmer’s opening monologue, while as vague as the rest of the dialogue in the film, is particularly haunting, and the performances throughout the film are actually uniformly good. The Thaw does the same thing Starship Troopers 3 does though, by confining its only star with any sort of audience draw to his own scenes, probably due to the fact that Kilmer was only on set for a few days. As a result, he and his daughter only interact on the screen once in 94 minutes.

I also dig the hell out of the Youtube-themed opening credit sequence, and despite the fact that it’s poorly implemented, the ecological framework of the movie at the very least peaked my interests throughout. Not a total waste of time, but not a brilliant use of it, either.

(PIC)
(PIC)
(PIC)

The Package

The Thaw is part of Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s Ghost House Underground label, which is essentially churning out a series of low-budget horror films by new filmmakers. This means the primary special feature on the disc is an onslaught of trailers for the other flicks in this series.

Also on the disc is a perfunctory behind the scenes documentary that doesn’t have too much going for it. Like the feature itself, The Thaw’s package is underwhelming at best.

BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Quality Cheese Productions
MSRP: $12.95
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Introduction by Troma sensation Lloyd Kaufman
• Two pairs of 3D glasses

The Pitch

“It’s German Expressionism for the Avatar generation!”

The Humans

Max Schreck. Gustav von Wangenheim. Greta Schroder. Lots of other Germans who have been dead for decades upon decades.

The Nutshell

The kind folks at Quality Cheese Productions present a new version of Nosferatu in 3D, with a bunch of added crap to counterbalance all of the gravitas they removed from it.

The Lowdown

The stupid tradition of returning to classic films in order to tinker with them, adding minute details and enhancing their special effects in anachronistic ways actually predates George Lucas’ work on the Star Wars films. You might remember the colorization blitz of the 80s and 90s, in which movies like Night of the Living Dead were splashed with muddy watercolors to appeal to a new generation of fools who find black and white boring. Hell, I still own my colorized version of It’s a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart’s clothing is adequately shaded but his face is left with the complexion of a walking corpse.

Thanks to the wild success of Avatar and the onslaught of 3D that has swiftly followed it, you can expect the same sort of scenario with 3D on DVD, in which older public domain titles are scooped up and injected with anaglyphic 3D for the sake of raking in a quick buck. Case in point: Keith Carter’s 3D resurrection of the 1922 film Nosferatu, retitled Orlok the Vampire in 3D.

On principle, I have trouble with anyone slapping their own name on a film that has existed for nearly 90 years, particularly if one’s motives are only to spice things up with a gimmicky technology. There is certainly a reason why F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is an acclaimed piece of silent cinema — the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula features excellent cinematography, good performances and some moments that are still chilling after nearly a century has passed. (Even in crappy anaglyphic 3D, the shot of Max Schreck’s Orlok rigidly rising from his coffin is absolutely haunting.)

Orlok the Vampire in 3D isn’t quite Nosferatu with a 3D makeover, though. Carter and company have taken the liberty of adding silly computer generated transitions. Silly bat logos swirl in as if to make a clever nod to a 1960s television series in the midst of a film that honestly has more to do with the imagery of rats, if anything. He’s also chopped the film to ribbons, skipping over slower paced, moody scenes, I suppose to propel the film forward faster. Look, it’s a silent film, fellas. If you don’t have patience for the way things worked in 1922, that’s your fault, not the film’s.

They’ve also sucked all the air out by adding a ridiculously madcap piano score that in no way reflects the subject material of the film, while adding new dialogue cards and a wierd dialogue track in which the characters speak in mumbled tones reminiscent of the language of The Sims. It’s a piece of work.

Which would be one thing if the new version of the film were a comedy — which, judging by the box art and the zany introduction by Toxic Avenger creator Lloyd Kaufman, was their intention — only it doesn’t feel that way. None of the subject material has been retooled for comedy, only the peripheral wackiness shoehorned into it. Pairing the broadest forms of comedy with a deadly serious silent film may have seemed like a good idea somewhere along the line, but certainly not toward the end.

When you pair that with the fact that the 3D is often completely ineffective — which is a no-brainer when you consider the quality of film the footage was shot on — Orlok the Vampire in 3D reveals itself to be a completely incompetent cash grab.

The Package

The DVD comes with two pairs of 3D glasses and lacks an option for scene selection, which in my book is a mark of the most refined quality. It includes the aforementioned introduction by Lloyd Kaufman, who seems to be high as a kite and utterly uninvolved with the film beyond perhaps a funding capacity. There’s a 2D option to view the film as well, but why not seek out a true blue version of Nosferatu instead?